III. SOME OLD CURIOSITIES
The evening sky, a dome of solid gold, unflaked even by a single
sunset cloud, steeped the meanest sights of London in a strange
and mellow light. It made a little greasy street of St. Martin's
Lane look as if it were paved with gold. It made the pawnbroker's
half-way down it shine as if it were really that Mountain of
Piety that the French poetic instinct has named it; it made the
mean pseudo-French bookshop, next but one to it, a shop packed
with dreary indecency, show for a moment a kind of Parisian
colour. And the shop that stood between the pawnshop and the shop
of dreary indecency, showed with quite a blaze of old world
beauty, for it was, by accident, a shop not unbeautiful in
itself. The front window had a glimmer of bronze and blue steel,
lit, as by a few stars, by the sparks of what were alleged to be
jewels; for it was in brief, a shop of bric-a-brac and old
curiosities. A row of half-burnished seventeenth-century swords
ran like an ornate railing along the front of the window; behind
was a darker glimmer of old oak and old armour; and higher up
hung the most extraordinary looking South Sea tools or utensils,
whether designed for killing enemies or merely for cooking them,
no mere white man could possibly conjecture. But the romance of
the eye, which really on this rich evening, clung about the shop,
had its main source in the accident of two doors standing open,
the front door that opened on the street and a back door that
opened on an odd green square of garden, that the sun turned to a
square of gold. There is nothing more beautiful than thus to look
as it were through the archway of a house; as if the open sky
were an interior chamber, and the sun a secret lamp of the place.
I have suggested that the sunset light made everything lovely. To
say that it made the keeper of the curiosity shop lovely would be
a tribute to it perhaps too extreme. It would easily have made
him beautiful if he had been merely squalid; if he had been a Jew
of the Fagin type. But he was a Jew of another and much less
admirable type; a Jew with a very well-sounding name. For though
there are no hard tests for separating the tares and the wheat of
any people, one rude but efficient guide is that the nice Jew is
called Moses Solomon, and the nasty Jew is called Thornton Percy.
The keeper of the curiosity shop was of the Thornton Percy branch
of the chosen people; he belonged to those Lost Ten Tribes whose
industrious object is to lose themselves. He was a man still
young, but already corpulent, with sleek dark hair, heavy
handsome clothes, and a full, fat, permanent smile, which looked
at the first glance kindly, and at the second cowardly. The name
over his shop was Henry Gordon, but two Scotchmen who were in his
shop that evening could come upon no trace of a Scotch accent.
These two Scotchmen in this shop were careful purchasers, but
free-handed payers. One of them who seemed to be the principal
and the authority (whom, indeed, Mr. Henry Gordon fancied he had
seen somewhere before), was a small, sturdy fellow, with fine
grey eyes, a square red tie and a square red beard, that he
carried aggressively forward as if he defied anyone to pull it.
The other kept so much in the background in comparison that he
looked almost ghostly in his grey cloak or plaid, a tall, sallow,
silent young man.
The two Scotchmen were interested in seventeenth-century swords.
They were fastidious about them. They had a whole armoury of
these weapons brought out and rolled clattering about the
counter, until they found two of precisely the same length.
Presumably they desired the exact symmetry for some decorative
trophy. Even then they felt the points, poised the swords for
balance and bent them in a circle to see that they sprang
straight again; which, for decorative purposes, seems carrying
realism rather far.
"These will do," said the strange person with the red beard.
"And perhaps I had better pay for them at once. And as you are
the challenger, Mr. MacIan, perhaps you had better explain the
situation."
The tall Scotchman in grey took a step forward and spoke in a
voice quite clear and bold, and yet somehow lifeless, like a man
going through an ancient formality.
"The fact is, Mr. Gordon, we have to place our honour in your
hands. Words have passed between Mr. Turnbull and myself on a
grave and invaluable matter, which can only be atoned for by
fighting. Unfortunately, as the police are in some sense pursuing
us, we are hurried, and must fight now and without seconds. But
if you will be so kind as to take us into your little garden and
see far play, we shall feel how----"
The shopman recovered himself from a stunning surprise and burst
out:
"Gentlemen, are you drunk? A duel! A duel in my garden. Go
home, gentlemen, go home. Why, what did you quarrel about?"
"We quarrelled," said Evan, in the same dead voice, "about
religion." The fat shopkeeper rolled about in his chair with
enjoyment.
"Well, this is a funny game," he said. "So you want to commit
murder on behalf of religion. Well, well my religion is a little
respect for humanity, and----"
"Excuse me," cut in Turnbull, suddenly and fiercely, pointing
towards the pawnbroker's next door. "Don't you own that shop?"
"Why--er--yes," said Gordon.
"And don't you own that shop?" repeated the secularist, pointing
backward to the pornographic bookseller.
"What if I do?"
"Why, then," cried Turnbull, with grating contempt. "I will leave
the religion of humanity confidently in your hands; but I am
sorry I troubled you about such a thing as honour. Look here, my
man. I do believe in humanity. I do believe in liberty. My father
died for it under the swords of the Yeomanry. I am going to die
for it, if need be, under that sword on your counter. But if
there is one sight that makes me doubt it it is your foul fat
face. It is hard to believe you were not meant to be ruled like a
dog or killed like a cockroach. Don't try your slave's philosophy
on me. We are going to fight, and we are going to fight in your
garden, with your swords. Be still! Raise your voice above a
whisper, and I run you through the body."
Turnbull put the bright point of the sword against the gay
waistcoat of the dealer, who stood choking with rage and fear,
and an astonishment so crushing as to be greater than either.
"MacIan," said Turnbull, falling almost into the familiar tone of
a business partner, "MacIan, tie up this fellow and put a gag in
his mouth. Be still, I say, or I kill you where you stand."
The man was too frightened to scream, but he struggled wildly,
while Evan MacIan, whose long, lean hands were unusually
powerful, tightened some old curtain cords round him, strapped a
rope gag in his mouth and rolled him on his back on the floor.
"There's nothing very strong here," said Evan, looking about him.
"I'm afraid he'll work through that gag in half an hour or so."
"Yes," said Turnbull, "but one of us will be killed by that
time."
"Well, let's hope so," said the Highlander, glancing doubtfully
at the squirming thing on the floor.
"And now," said Turnbull, twirling his fiery moustache and
fingering his sword, "let us go into the garden. What an
exquisite summer evening!"
MacIan said nothing, but lifting his sword from the counter went
out into the sun.
The brilliant light ran along the blades, filling the channels of
them with white fire; the combatants stuck their swords in the
turf and took off their hats, coats, waistcoats, and boots. Evan
said a short Latin prayer to himself, during which Turnbull made
something of a parade of lighting a cigarette which he flung away
the instant after, when he saw MacIan apparently standing ready.
Yet MacIan was not exactly ready. He stood staring like a man
stricken with a trance.
"What are you staring at?" asked Turnbull. "Do you see the
bobbies?"
"I see Jerusalem," said Evan, "all covered with the shields and
standards of the Saracens."
"Jerusalem!" said Turnbull, laughing. "Well, we've taken the only
inhabitant into captivity."
And he picked up his sword and made it whistle like a boy's wand.
"I beg your pardon," said MacIan, dryly. "Let us begin."
MacIan made a military salute with his weapon, which Turnbull
copied or parodied with an impatient contempt; and in the
stillness of the garden the swords came together with a clear
sound like a bell. The instant the blades touched, each felt them
tingle to their very points with a personal vitality, as if they
were two naked nerves of steel. Evan had worn throughout an air
of apathy, which might have been the stale apathy of one who
wants nothing. But it was indeed the more dreadful apathy of one
who wants something and will care for nothing else. And this was
seen suddenly; for the instant Evan engaged he disengaged and
lunged with an infernal violence. His opponent with a desperate
promptitude parried and riposted; the parry only just succeeded,
the riposte failed. Something big and unbearable seemed to have
broken finally out of Evan in that first murderous lunge, leaving
him lighter and cooler and quicker upon his feet. He fell to
again, fiercely still, but now with a fierce caution. The next
moment Turnbull lunged; MacIan seemed to catch the point and
throw it away from him, and was thrusting back like a
thunderbolt, when a sound paralysed him; another sound beside
their ringing weapons. Turnbull, perhaps from an equal
astonishment, perhaps from chivalry, stopped also and forebore to
send his sword through his exposed enemy.
"What's that?" asked Evan, hoarsely.
A heavy scraping sound, as of a trunk being dragged along a
littered floor, came from the dark shop behind them.
"The old Jew has broken one of his strings, and he's crawling
about," said Turnbull. "Be quick! We must finish before he gets
his gag out."
"Yes, yes, quick! On guard!" cried the Highlander. The blades
crossed again with the same sound like song, and the men went to
work again with the same white and watchful faces. Evan, in his
impatience, went back a little to his wildness. He made
windmills, as the French duellists say, and though he was
probably a shade the better fencer of the two, he found the
other's point pass his face twice so close as almost to graze his
cheek. The second time he realized the actual possibility of
defeat and pulled himself together under a shock of the sanity of
anger. He narrowed, and, so to speak, tightened his operations:
he fenced (as the swordsman's boast goes), in a wedding ring; he
turned Turnbull's thrusts with a maddening and almost mechanical
click, like that of a machine. Whenever Turnbull's sword sought
to go over that other mere white streak it seemed to be caught in
a complex network of steel. He turned one thrust, turned another,
turned another. Then suddenly he went forward at the lunge with
his whole living weight. Turnbull leaped back, but Evan lunged
and lunged and lunged again like a devilish piston rod or
battering ram. And high above all the sound of the struggle there
broke into the silent evening a bellowing human voice, nasal,
raucous, at the highest pitch of pain. "Help! Help! Police!
Murder! Murder!" The gag was broken; and the tongue of terror
was loose.
"Keep on!" gasped Turnbull. "One may be killed before they come."
The voice of the screaming shopkeeper was loud enough to drown
not only the noise of the swords but all other noises around it,
but even through its rending din there seemed to be some other
stir or scurry. And Evan, in the very act of thrusting at
Turnbull, saw something in his eyes that made him drop his sword.
The atheist, with his grey eyes at their widest and wildest, was
staring straight over his shoulder at the little archway of shop
that opened on the street beyond. And he saw the archway blocked
and blackened with strange figures.
"We must bolt, MacIan," he said abruptly. "And there isn't a
damned second to lose either. Do as I do."
With a bound he was beside the little cluster of his clothes and
boots that lay on the lawn; he snatched them up, without waiting
to put any of them on; and tucking his sword under his other arm,
went wildly at the wall at the bottom of the garden and swung
himself over it. Three seconds after he had alighted in his socks
on the other side, MacIan alighted beside him, also in his socks
and also carrying clothes and sword in a desperate bundle.
They were in a by-street, very lean and lonely itself, but so
close to a crowded thoroughfare that they could see the vague
masses of vehicles going by, and could even see an individual
hansom cab passing the corner at the instant. Turnbull put his
fingers to his mouth like a gutter-snipe and whistled twice. Even
as he did so he could hear the loud voices of the neighbours and
the police coming down the garden.
The hansom swung sharply and came tearing down the little lane at
his call. When the cabman saw his fares, however, two wild-haired
men in their shirts and socks with naked swords under their arms,
he not unnaturally brought his readiness to a rigid stop and
stared suspiciously.
"You talk to him a minute," whispered Turnbull, and stepped back
into the shadow of the wall.
"We want you," said MacIan to the cabman, with a superb Scotch
drawl of indifference and assurance, "to drive us to St. Pancras
Station--verra quick."
"Very sorry, sir," said the cabman, "but I'd like to know it was
all right. Might I arst where you come from, sir?"
A second after he spoke MacIan heard a heavy voice on the other
side of the wall, saying: "I suppose I'd better get over and look
for them. Give me a back."
"Cabby," said MacIan, again assuming the most deliberate and
lingering lowland Scotch intonation, "if ye're really verra
anxious to ken whar a' come fra', I'll tell ye as a verra great
secret. A' come from Scotland. And a'm gaein' to St. Pancras
Station. Open the doors, cabby."
The cabman stared, but laughed. The heavy voice behind the wall
said: "Now then, a better back this time, Mr. Price." And from
the shadow of the wall Turnbull crept out. He had struggled
wildly into his coat (leaving his waistcoat on the pavement), and
he was with a fierce pale face climbing up the cab behind the
cabman. MacIan had no glimmering notion of what he was up to, but
an instinct of discipline, inherited from a hundred men of war,
made him stick to his own part and trust the other man's.
"Open the doors, cabby," he repeated, with something of the
obstinate solemnity of a drunkard, "open the doors. Did ye no
hear me say St. Pancras Station?"
The top of a policeman's helmet appeared above the garden wall.
The cabman did not see it, but he was still suspicious and began:
"Very sorry, sir, but..." and with that the catlike Turnbull tore
him out of his seat and hurled him into the street below, where
he lay suddenly stunned.
"Give me his hat," said Turnbull in a silver voice, that the
other obeyed like a bugle. "And get inside with the swords."
And just as the red and raging face of a policeman appeared above
the wall, Turnbull struck the horse with a terrible cut of the
whip and the two went whirling away like a boomerang.
They had spun through seven streets and three or four squares
before anything further happened. Then, in the neighbourhood of
Maida Vale, the driver opened the trap and talked through it in a
manner not wholly common in conversations through that aperture.
"Mr. MacIan," he said shortly and civilly.
"Mr. Turnbull," replied his motionless fare.
"Under circumstances such as those in which we were both recently
placed there was no time for anything but very abrupt action. I
trust therefore that you have no cause to complain of me if I
have deferred until this moment a consultation with you on our
present position or future action. Our present position, Mr.
MacIan, I imagine that I am under no special necessity of
describing. We have broken the law and we are fleeing from its
officers. Our future action is a thing about which I myself
entertain sufficiently strong views; but I have no right to
assume or to anticipate yours, though I may have formed a decided
conception of your character and a decided notion of what they
will probably be. Still, by every principle of intellectual
justice, I am bound to ask you now and seriously whether you wish
to continue our interrupted relations."
MacIan leant his white and rather weary face back upon the
cushions in order to speak up through the open door.
"Mr. Turnbull," he said, "I have nothing to add to what I have
said before. It is strongly borne in upon me that you and I, the
sole occupants of this runaway cab, are at this moment the two
most important people in London, possibly in Europe. I have been
looking at all the streets as we went past, I have been looking
at all the shops as we went past, I have been looking at all the
churches as we went past. At first, I felt a little dazed with
the vastness of it all. I could not understand what it all meant.
But now I know exactly what it all means. It means us. This whole
civilization is only a dream. You and I are the realities."
"Religious symbolism," said Mr. Turnbull, through the trap, "does
not, as you are probably aware, appeal ordinarily to thinkers of
the school to which I belong. But in symbolism as you use it in
this instance, I must, I think, concede a certain truth. We
_must_ fight this thing out somewhere; because, as you truly say,
we have found each other's reality. We _must_ kill each other--or
convert each other. I used to think all Christians were
hypocrites, and I felt quite mildly towards them really. But I
know you are sincere--and my soul is mad against you. In the same
way you used, I suppose, to think that all atheists thought
atheism would leave them free for immorality--and yet in your
heart you tolerated them entirely. Now you _know_ that I am an
honest man, and you are mad against me, as I am against you. Yes,
that's it. You can't be angry with bad men. But a good man in the
wrong--why one thirsts for his blood. Yes, you open for me a
vista of thought."
"Don't run into anything," said Evan, immovably.
"There's something in that view of yours, too," said Turnbull,
and shut down the trap.
They sped on through shining streets that shot by them like
arrows. Mr. Turnbull had evidently a great deal of unused
practical talent which was unrolling itself in this ridiculous
adventure. They had got away with such stunning promptitude that
the police chase had in all probability not even properly begun.
But in case it had, the amateur cabman chose his dizzy course
through London with a strange dexterity. He did not do what would
have first occurred to any ordinary outsider desiring to destroy
his tracks. He did not cut into by-ways or twist his way through
mean streets. His amateur common sense told him that it was
precisely the poor street, the side street, that would be likely
to remember and report the passing of a hansom cab, like the
passing of a royal procession. He kept chiefly to the great
roads, so full of hansoms that a wilder pair than they might
easily have passed in the press. In one of the quieter streets
Evan put on his boots.
Towards the top of Albany Street the singular cabman again opened
the trap.
"Mr. MacIan," he said, "I understand that we have now definitely
settled that in the conventional language honour is not
satisfied. Our action must at least go further than it has gone
under recent interrupted conditions. That, I believe, is
understood."
"Perfectly," replied the other with his bootlace in his teeth.
"Under those conditions," continued Turnbull, his voice coming
through the hole with a slight note of trepidation very unusual
with him, "I have a suggestion to make, if that can be called a
suggestion, which has probably occurred to you as readily as to
me. Until the actual event comes off we are practically in the
position if not of comrades, at least of business partners. Until
the event comes off, therefore I should suggest that quarrelling
would be inconvenient and rather inartistic; while the ordinary
exchange of politeness between man and man would be not only
elegant but uncommonly practical."
"You are perfectly right," answered MacIan, with his melancholy
voice, "in saying that all this has occurred to me. All duellists
should behave like gentlemen to each other. But we, by the
queerness of our position, are something much more than either
duellists or gentlemen. We are, in the oddest and most exact
sense of the term, brothers--in arms."
"Mr. MacIan," replied Turnbull, calmly, "no more need be said."
And he closed the trap once more.
They had reached Finchley Road before he opened it again.
Then he said, "Mr. MacIan, may I offer you a cigar. It will be a
touch of realism."
"Thank you," answered Evan. "You are very kind." And he began to
smoke in the cab.
